When a television receiver device is turned off via a remote controller, it is generally only placed in a lower power consumption standby mode in which the remote control receiver remains active and several other functions such as a real-time clock may remain active. However, users commonly refer to this state as “off” despite the power consumption not actually being zero.
Due to the increasing complexity of television (TV) sets, the startup time for a user to get from the off (standby) state to a desired channel and/or input (including boot time and time to navigate to the desired channel and input) has increased. Prior generations of television sets often utilized embedded assembler and other techniques to control the TV processor that operated very quickly resulting in a quick boot up time. However, the complexity of current and future generations of television sets makes use of such techniques unmanageable. As a result, TV sets are now being developed to utilize a Linux kernel and higher level programming in order to implement the many complex features of a television. This in turn makes advanced features easier to implement, but unfortunately results in the TV not being fully responsive for several minutes. The problem is compounded with digital TV which not only requires a tuner to tune to a particular frequency, but also requires filtering by packet identifier to obtain the proper data stream for a major and minor channel, and audio and video decoding of the channel's data stream to begin before a channel actually appears tuned to the user. Hence, a user could actuate the power switch and not be able to actually view a desired channel or input for several minutes.